Question: Hey George, I was wondering what if any other things use VR to help develop things that would be too dangerous to do in person.

George Fulton answered on 8 Mar 2019:

Absolutely. The remote maintenance at the nuclear fusion reactor at Culham uses a virtual reality world as well as the real life reactor when carrying out vital work. If the machine is going to hit anything it shouldn’t then the robot is stopped. This is a sort of safety catch 🙂 The robot is called a ‘master-slave’ robot. A controller gets to control two robotic arms and the real robot (around 200 m of so away) makes the identical movement. It gets cooler than that though, the robot has force feedback. That means when the robot touches something, then the controller can feel that too! This is especially useful for doing hands on jobs in robotic maintenance such as replacing screws. An overtightened screw might cause the threading to break and the screw get stuck. That would be very bad news 😛